What makes it different from others?

Purely Joyful Movie!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

Don't waste your time on this. Irene Dunne could do much better. As for Richard Dix, he looked like a combination of a poor man's John Barrymore and Clark Gable who was trying to act like Douglas Fairbanks. Spoilers follow: They would have the audience believe that Hilda would throw away a career as the 19th century equivalent of a rock star, staying at luxury hotels with her personal maid and her manager--a nice guy who loves her and wants to marry her--to go off and live on the lam with a convicted felon who escaped from prison and his idiot sidekick, setting herself up as an accomplice and risk going to prison herself. What a load of crap! I finished it only because I was waiting for him to get killed so she would come to her senses, since the 30's were full of "crime doesn't pay" movies, but the last scene was so awful it was funny and I don't think it was intentional.

This is a really disappointing movie by highly talented Wiliam Wellman,compared with magnificent works such as "wild boys of the road" "heroes for sale" or "the conquerors",the latter also featuring Richard Dix (playing two parts in the same final scenes!) .This far fetched story of a bandit with a big heart who helps his protégée ,a servant,to become a great diva ,is not convincing:the ending is very romantic but might disappoint the audience who might call for more .On stage ,the diva performs the Castafiore 's biggest hit (see "the adventures of Tin Tin")in French ,Gounod's "Air Des Bijoux " (Ah!Je Ris De me Voir Si belle En Ce Miroir =Ah my beauty past compare.....) Half melodrama ,Irene Dunne's field ,half musical (there are plenty of songs),"Stingaree" should be reserved for Wellman's buffs ,but there are plenty of them,including myself.

Based on a story by "Raffles" creator E. W. Hornung (brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), directed by William A. Wellman and promoted as reuniting Irene Dunne (billed first this time) and Richard Dix from the cast of RKO's blockbuster "Cimarron," "Stingaree" is a ridiculous film but also an enjoyable one if you don't take it too seriously. True, it doesn't play to Wellman's strengths as a director (as the awesome, woefully underrated "Safe in Hell" had done a year earlier) or to Irene Dunne's talents as a comedienne, but her singing (her own voice; she was a fully trained operatic mezzo-soprano and had auditioned for the Met before signing with RKO) is gorgeous. Plot-wise this seems like a beta version of a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film — all it needed was a male star who could sing (or a voice double for Richard Dix) — and though the promise of the first reel that it was going to be "Cimarron" in Australia was not fulfilled, it was still a lot of fun. Incidentally, I wondered if any of it was inspired by the life of real-life diva Nellie Melba, the first international opera star to come from Australia. (There's been at least one other since: Joan Sutherland.)

It was a static bore, and there wasn't a single actor in it remotely believable as an "Australian." I stayed up until 2Am to watch it, but it wasn't worth it. Only surprising thing was that Irene Dunne occasionally had a look which reminded me of how beautiful she really was at that time, I finally understood how the likes of Cary Grant could lust after her on screen. Otherwise, there's very little to this one. Richard Dix may have been a big star post-"Cimarron," but his over-emoting and head-wagging hearkened back here very obviously to the silents. And he and Andy Devine (of course, in this instance) both looked suspiciously well-fed for bandits beating their perilous way through the OutbackSo yes, it's basically a clinker.